For somebody at the beginning of something — still at school, newly qualified, or one week into work they do not yet understand. Mostly people looking back at who they were, which is the only vantage from which this advice is any good.
48 people · 303 answers
Musician, poet and photographer
Build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don’t make compromises. Don’t worry about making a bunch of money or being successful. Be concerned about doing good work and protect your work.
Recorded · Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art · 2012
Civil-rights activist
The advice I would give any young person is, first of all, to rid themselves of prejudice against other people and to be concerned about what they can do to help others.
Recorded · American Academy of Achievement · 1995
Chief executive of YouTube; Google's first marketing manager
Life doesn't offer you the perfect opportunity at the perfect time. Opportunities come when you least expect them ... Rarely are opportunities presented to you in a perfect way.
Recorded · HuffPost · 2014
Co-founder and chief executive of Apple; co-founder of NeXT; chief executive of Pixar
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking.
Recorded · Stanford News (Stanford University) · 2005
Engineer and designer; led the iPod and iPhone teams at Apple, founder of Nest Labs
Learn by doing, not learn first, then do. The way you discover what it is you like to do in life is by doing first, then learning about it.
Recorded · Academy of Achievement · 2016
Peace activist; Nobel Peace Prize laureate, 2011
My key message to her, as a nine-year-old, recently has been, “You don’t need to be friends with everyone, but you’re forced to respect everyone.
Recorded · Academy of Achievement · 2018
Biomedical engineer; Institute Professor at MIT
I didn’t realize that scientists were like that, and that people were like that. I would have thought — and I like to hope — that I encourage people rather than discourage people.
Recorded · Academy of Achievement · 2012
U.S. Representative from Georgia, 1987–2020; Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee 1963–1966
I would come home and ask my mother, my father, my grandparents, my great-grandparents, 'Why?'. And they would say, 'That's the way it is. Don't get in the way, don't get in trouble!'
Recorded · Speakola (speech transcript archive) · 2014
Chief executive of PepsiCo, 2006–2018
In order to grasp every opportunity, you cannot — you must not — decide your "career path" in advance.
Recorded · Wake Forest University · 2011
Founder and executive chairperson of Biocon
Don’t be a “me too” entrepreneur. Leaders and organizations that only follow cannot be successful over the long term.
Recorded · Boston Consulting Group · 2021
Biologist and physician; Nobel laureate in chemistry for the discovery of ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation
if you drive yourself to win prizes, I think you will never get it, as you are busy thinking about it. And secondly, this is a bad way of living life.
Recorded · Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings · 2014
President of the Philippines, 1986–1992
I held out for participation in the 1984 election the dictatorship called, even if I knew it would be rigged.
Recorded · AmericanRhetoric.com · 1986
Developmental biologist; Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine, 1995
As I was lazy and rarely did my homework, I finished high school with a rather mediocre exam. I almost did not pass in English language.
Recorded · Nobel Prize Outreach · 1995
Filmmaker; creator of Star Wars and founder of Lucasfilm
Whenever you’re making a movie, especially when you’re writing, you always have self-doubts. I did the first location shooting in Tunisia.
Recorded · Academy of Achievement · 1999
Founder of Teach For America; chief executive of Teach For All
I applied to one firm in every sector. This was the most half-hearted job search.
Recorded · American Academy of Achievement · 2013
Vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, 1978–2023
Life will have terrible blows, horrible blows, unfair blows. Doesn't matter. And some people recover and others don't. And there I think the attitude of Epictetus is the best.
Recorded · Speakola · 2007
Co-founder and chief executive of Airbnb
When we started Airbnb, no one wanted to invest. I felt like a failure so many days. It was small, it wasn't growing... A sane person probably would have quit.
Recorded · Yahoo Finance
Film director, photographer and installation artist
I have never made any money from my films but I have won prizes and recognition. I have been on the margins forever.
Recorded · Eye For Film · 2018
Psychologist; laureate of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences, 2002
Amos and I shared the wonder of together owning a goose that could lay golden eggs – a joint mind that was better than our separate minds.
Recorded · Nobel Prize Outreach · 2002
President of Costa Rica, 1986–1990 and 2006–2010
My country is a country of teachers. It is therefore a country of peace. We discuss our successes and failures in complete freedom.
Recorded · The Nobel Foundation · 1987
Chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, 1970–2025
We've just passed a milestone: Twenty years ago, on January 3, 1972, Blue Chip Stamps (then an affiliate of Berkshire and later merged into it) bought control of See's Candy Shops, a West…
Recorded · Berkshire Hathaway Inc. · 1992
Swiss professional tennis player, 1998–2022
Of all the gifts that tennis has given me over the years, the greatest, without a doubt, has been the people I've met along the way: my friends, my competitors, and most of all the fans who…
Recorded · Reuters · 2022
Co-founder and chief executive of Airbnb
We need to have mentors. I think I've always been pretty shameless about seeking out people much smarter and much more experienced than me from the very beginning.
Recorded · Fortune · 2017
Poet, essayist and translator
I was not much taken by their poems, but I liked Leconte de Lisle’s translation of Homer, especially his Iliad, which brought me the classical world.
Recorded · The Paris Review, Issue 131, Summer 1994 · 1994
Co-founder of Microsoft; co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
I read Stephen Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature a few years ago and got to talk to him about it after, which was a lot of fun.
Recorded · TIME · 2017
Atmospheric chemist; Nobel laureate in Chemistry, 1995
It was probably a series of biographies of scientists like Pasteur, or even earlier ones — Leeuwenhoek inventing the microscope and Madame Curie.
Recorded · Academy of Achievement · 1996
Pharmaceutical chemist; Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine, 2015
In Ge Hong's A Handbook of Prescriptions for Emergencies (肘后备急方), I noticed one sentence "A handful of Qinghao immersed in two liters of water, wring out the juice and drink it all" (青蒿一握,…
Recorded · Nobel Prize Outreach · 2015
Stem cell biologist; Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine, 2012
A book also pushed me to become a medical doctor.
Recorded · Nobel Prize Outreach · 2012
Novelist and critic
Read Becoming a Writer, by Dorothea Brande. Then do what it says, including the tasks you think are impossible.
Recorded · The Guardian · 2010
Biochemist; Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine, 2023
When I was 16 years old, I read the book from Hans Selye. Hans Selye is a Canadian scientist, but he was Hungarian so his book was translated to Hungarian.
Recorded · Nobel Prize Outreach · 2023
Mountaineer and explorer; first ascent of Everest, 1953
My mother used to say to me a thing which, when I look back on it, wasn’t terribly logical.
Recorded · Academy of Achievement
Financier; co-founder of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.
One person that is my role model is my father. ... He’s a man who taught me something very important. And that was — give back to society what you’ve taken out.
Recorded · Academy of Achievement · 1991
Commissioner of the National Football League, 1960–1989
reputation is what people think you are, and your character is what you are.
Recorded · Academy of Achievement · 1991
Animator, cartoon director and screenwriter
My mother said — and I didn’t realize how well it works — when I’d bring a drawing to her, she said, “I don’t look at the drawing.
Recorded · Academy of Achievement (achievement.org)
Conductor; Music and Artistic Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic
Maestro Abreu always said something very, very beautiful.
Recorded · Academy of Achievement (achievement.org)
Game designer; co-creator of Exploding Kittens
There’s a few that are immediate, because he just drilled them into my head. One is “Nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd.” Try as hard as you want to market something, get a crowd.
Recorded · The Tim Ferriss Show · 2023
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